I’m at the halfway point in drafting my new book, my second, and taking a break – to the extent that writing blog posts and attending to side projects is a break. In any case, they are easier than daily writing, and a welcome respite.

For this post, I want to offer a simple and quite flexible tool for diagnosing the general state of our efforts and pursuits, whether personal or organizational. Often, when we are immersed in work or other endeavors, we may not adequately see our essential context, or the main reason or reasons that things are as they are.

But this needn’t and generally shouldn’t be the case, since excessive immersion can greatly reduce our effectiveness, and because reframing or perspective-increasing tools are widely available and fairly easy to use. And I have found one tool in particular, probing for our point of greatest resistance or our main strategic bottleneck or barrier to success, to be especially powerful – helping us to quickly gauge our situation, and our potential opportunity to either redouble, adjust, or wholly change our efforts.

Simple Mapping Tool To Assess Personal & Organizational Barriers

There of course are many ways of assessing or diagnosing our efforts and increasing situational awareness, but focusing on resistance points or strategic weakness is often remarkably simple and intuitive, and frequently provides a higher initial result than other approaches. And to make the approach even easier, I would encourage you simply to consider or probe for resistance in just two areas, ones essential for success in any domain: 1) the state of production or your current supply potential, and 2) the state of consumption or your current demand conditions. In this approach, we look for basic barriers, or points of resistance, in both domains – and then seek to understand the reasons why.

In my experience, the approach is remarkably straightforward and reliably generates fresh insights – whether we use it in our lives or work, and alone or in groups. As a consulting strategist, it can help me to quickly understand the main barriers or issues an organization is facing, from startups to long-established enterprises. In your life and work, the technique of probing for resistance may help you to see various efforts in a new and often quite fundamental way, providing insights that you can consider, test, and then act on.

When using the approach, all personal and organizational efforts are understood as potentially subject to critical barriers or points of resistance in one or both of two areas:

> Production – the ability of a person or group to produce or create something of value – whether a raw material, product, service, experience, or change. In general, when the point of greatest resistance involves production, this points to immature, inadequate, inefficient, ineffective, or otherwise misdirected execution on an idea, value proposition, or mission.

> Consumption – the interest or willingness of people to buy or otherwise use a person’s or organization’s output. When the point of greatest resistance involves consumption, sometimes this is owing to lack of awareness or publicity, a state of affairs that is often easily or progressively overcome (if not, this suggests awareness is not the primary issue). But more generally, poor or weak consumption, demand, or uptake of an offering points to inadequate value in the offering – or the idea, proposition, or mission underlying the offering. Costs may be too high, benefits too low or too ambiguous, or both.

As my graphic above illustrates, the idea of potentially low or high states of both production and consumption also can be used to create a four-part model that describes productive efforts generally. Where there are no major points of resistance in production and consumption, this suggests thriving conditions for an effort. At the other extreme, significant resistance in both domains indicates an effort or enterprise is struggling and suggests a basic rethinking of actions, approach, and goals.

When a personal or organizational effort has high productive or supply capacity, but low or inadequate consumption or demand, this almost always suggests untapped, misallocated, or misdirected capacity – or a condition of less than fully successful striving – and therefore a need to examine and increase the value of the output (benefits minus costs). Importantly however, if such value-increasing changes are not obvious, then the condition instead indicates a need to revisit underlying assumptions and even the basic mission of the effort or endeavor.

On the other hand, where demand is high or increasing, but production capacity is the point of resistance, as is often the case in start-up and aspiring ventures, this suggests that an examination and rethinking of current production plans or operating models is in order. Often, this will involve new investments, new techniques, or new production partners.

I would encourage you to use this two-part approach for assessing resistance points, along with the above model of productive efforts, right away. This is both to deepen your understanding of the approach and because it can be so useful. As highlighted, you can apply the approach to current efforts in your life, to planned or nascent ones, to an organization you work for or are interested in, or to the efforts of people and groups around you.

As I often do, you are likely to find this simple approach or shorthand quite powerful and applicable in many settings. In practice, it can help us to understand and strategically reframe efforts in ways that are useful, immediately actionable, and enduring. And it frequently will provide fundamental insights into how endeavors of all types and sizes might be made more vibrant, growing, compelling, and valuable.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and his transformative Natural Strategy method!

For that discussion, I considered several ways we might measure national advancement, and how each measure – or each alternative framing of the question – produced very different national rankings.

At the end of the discussion, and as I did in my first book The Seven Keys of Natural Life, I encouraged readers to consider a relatively new measure called the HPI, produced by the New Economics Foundation. In my reading, the HPI can serve as a rough or preliminary measure of national adaptivity, or adaptive health. HPI stands for Happy Planet Index, though for me it would be better named, and in any case thought of, as a Healthy People Index.

Importantly, however adaptive health is best measured, and thus predicted, for me adaptive health is the ultimate performance metric, whether for individuals, groups, species, or whole ecosystems. In nature, health – here defined as the ability to steadily survive over time and amid progressive challenges or uncertainty – is the final test of life, and therefore the ultimate measure of all measures.

Some Nations Are Wealthier or Happier, But Which Ones Are Healthier?

Since my earlier advocacy of the HPI, the metric has undergone an important and I believe positive change, increasing from three to four internal variables. In this post, I’d like to review the change, highlight why I believe the HPI is improved via the added variable, and explain reasons why the HPI remains an important preliminary or suggestive measure of what matters most at a national level today – adaptivity or each nation’s likely potential to survive, and therefore thrive, in time.

With these goals in mind, below is an overview of the new HPI metric, including the rationale or working hypothesis for including its now four variables in a measure seeking to gauge and predict adaptive health at a national level:

> Happiness – the original and revised HPI metric begins with a measure of reported national happiness, which is taken from the Gallup World Poll. While happiness may be an important end in itself, and perhaps needs no additional justification in some regards, we have good reason to believe that happier people also will be healthier or more adaptive people too in several important domains of natural life (if with some upward natural limits). People who are happy or experience well-being have been shown in correlational research to: 1) be more physically healthy and fit, 2) have more varied and innovative behaviors, 3) be more moral or principled and less apt to engage in criminality or possess dark triad attributes, 4) be flourishing or growing by various measures, 5) have superior mental or cognitive functioning, 6) be more optimistic, which often brings important adaptive benefits, 7) have superior adaptive profiles within the Big Five personality model, 8) be more purposeful and industrious, 9) have greater self-efficacy, 10) have stronger and more beneficial social relationships or greater social capital, and 11) better cope with pain, hardship, and adversity. On a more cautionary note, slightly curtailed happiness, or controlled hedonistic behaviors, have been found in other research to be associated with reduced addictive tendencies, greater future orientation and goal achievement, and more meaningful or fulfilling experiences of life.

> Life Expectancy – average national life expectancy or longevity is also carried through in the revised HPI metric, and is calculated from World Health Organization Survey Data. As with a happy life, a long life may be desirable in itself, but we again have good reason to believe that longer-lived nations will be healthier or more adaptive ones on average too. There are a number of reasons for this, some more intuitive or uncontroversial than others. First, increasing lifespans generally signal greater social security, improved ability to assure essential human needs, greater intelligence or wisdom in public and private life, and likely reduced aggression and violence – all fairly intuitive goods and understandable signals of adaptive social advancement and maturity . Somewhat more subtly, increased life expectancy is also associated with added future certainty, and thus can lead to delayed personal gratification and greater focus on future outcomes and goal achievement, by individuals and groups overall. Greater life expectancy therefore can naturally foster heightened self and social investment over time, which can be understood as highly adaptive overall compared with more presentistic or present-oriented functioning (though notably, while often engendering somewhat less happy life overall). Lastly, and more technically, nations able to achieve and sustain long lifespans are likely to have more fully made the transition to low-birth rate/low-death rate societal functioning, which is thought to be an essential aspect or even the basis of the modern transformation – and modernity’s increasing education levels, greater natural and scientific awareness, reduced fatalism and parochialism, and resulting potential for enduring human freedom from natural poverty or material entrapment. Overall, these and other modern changes suggest, though do not guarantee, the potential for fundamentally new human sentience, adaptation, and natural progress or evolutionary ascent.

> Equality – as indicated before, measurement of the equality, inequality, or distribution of the above happiness and life expectancy measures within each nation is a new addition to the HPI, via a procedure that can be understood as calculating and averaging the GINI Coefficient of each national data set. In practice, the case for, or against, promoting social or economic equality is often made on moral or political grounds. But here I want to highlight the potential adaptive health benefits of relatively high equality in social outcomes, within and between nations. At the same time, I also want to underscore that the optimal amount and forms of social equality within and across modern societies, and notably from an adaptive health standpoint, is an empirical and open question. That said, we have good reason to believe that, all other things being similar, fairly equal social conditions are likely to be more adaptive relative to highly unequal ones. We can understand this natural relationship via the various health benefits of: 1) greater social cohesion and inclusiveness or democracy, which generally include positive happiness effects, 2) reduced marginalization and estrangement of people and groups, increasing productivity and reducing natural costs from social divisiveness (including crime and other antisocial, needlessly competitive, and self-defeating social behaviors), 3) increasing average education levels and principled sociality, and 4) eliminating various disincentives and barriers naturally arising from social and economic inequality, barriers which often result in reduced excellence or meritocracy in social groups. Given this, relatively high social equality is likely to be a net adaptive benefit in modern nations, especially where average conditions are above poverty levels, therefore permit compounding and generally progressive personal and social self-investment, and where equalization programs do not create disincentives to ongoing natural innovation and industriousness.

> Sustainability – the last and another carryover component of the HPI is a measure of each nation’s ecological footprint, via a total and per-capita land-use estimate from the Global Footprint Network. Overall, it’s not hard to understand why sustainability, or relative freedom from the risk of resource shortfalls, is essential to societal adaptation and adaptive social health in the long-term. Similarly, it is a fairly intuitive argument why reduced consumption levels might be a good indicator of increased sustainability and therefore greater adaptive health, especially when all other things are similar. That said, it’s important to highlight that there is likely a strong lower limit to such linkages, since conditions of poverty or material entrapment may be sustainable but also not especially fertile, empowering, yielding, or progressive from an evolutionary or human development standpoint, and notably relative to more materially affluent and innovative conditions. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to imagine future technological and systems development that enable high consumption levels that are fully sustainable ecologically. But would such developments obviate the need to consider consumption levels in national, societal, or species adaptive health assessments? Perhaps not. The reason for this is that high consumption levels, consumerism, materialism, or wealth-focused life generally, even if sustainable, may be naturally confounding and significantly at odds with long-term adaptive health promotion – see materialism, hedonic treadmill, cynicism, and meaningful life. In any case, a nation’s relative ecological footprint is likely an important indicator of both absolute and relative adaptive health levels, especially for non-subsistent nations whose consumption patterns are not yet fully sustainable.

One frequent objection to the HPI as an adaptive health measure is that it fails to appreciate specific evolutionary tasks that appear to lie in our future, if we are to survive as a species and progressively evolve into more advanced species over time. In particular, while the HPI can be understood as recognizing and promoting the need for ecological sustainability on our planet, this is less clearly the case as respects extraterrestrial adaptive challenges and opportunities – including diverting threatening asteroids and the still larger task of becoming a multi-stellar species.

Such efforts of course involve advanced technology, resource use, and intensity of effort. But I would point out that they also include persistency of action as well, and thus invoke sustainability considerations too. As such, the general economic model of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations may not be workable in time, since the model risks global ecological collapse if extended to all nations and global social collapse if it is reserved for some nations only. Given this, more modestly resourced or consumptive social models may actually prove superior in terms of acting on our extraterrestrial adaptive threats and opportunities over time – perhaps taking slightly longer to achieve needed functional outcomes, but also offering a more certain or secure path to our species achievement of these ends.

Overall, the HPI metric has many advantages or grounds for support as a preliminary measure of adaptive health at a national and international level. And for me, this is especially true in the absence of both superior measures and, more fundamentally, robust efforts to explore and develop such measures – as naturally important, thought-provoking, and transformative as this work might be in our time.

This link will take you to the current national HPI list, and I have included the current top-ten HPI nations below:

Costa Rica

Mexico

Colombia

Vanuatu

Vietnam

Panama

Nicaragua

Bangladesh

Thailand

Ecuador

I would encourage you to explore the HPI and broader set of ideas I have introduced, and also perhaps to think of new and improved ways we might better measure, predict, and ultimately promote and pursue adaptive health in our modern nations – and across our modern world, for species overall, and in time.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and his transformative Natural Strategy method!

Describing perception as a door or gateway is a recurring and well-known theme in literature, philosophy, and science.

I want to add to this body of work and explore this crucial idea with you, since it can be so important to the mastery of life, and even the path to a whole new way of life.

As you will see, my treatment of the topic may be different from the perception-door analogies you know best, or that are most common in popular culture today.

Overall, our discussion will distill and build upon a central theme from my Seven Keys – the often overlooked but always waiting, reliable, natural, and naturally transformative power of conscious attentiveness.

The World We Pass Through Each Day, Sublime And Waiting To Be Perceived

As a contemporary person, the perception-door analogy that may first come to mind for you is Huxley’s Doors of Perception, a counterculture classic and staple, and the inspiration for the name of the still more famous American rock band, The Doors. Huxley’s work recounts, and recommends, his extraordinary and evocative experiences under the influence of the psychoactive drug mescaline.

Huxley’s book, in turn, takes its title from a line by the 18th century British poet, William Blake, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Though Blake’s work and the meaning of this particular line are each subject to different interpretations, I will take his original intent with the words cleansing perception as meaning looking past authority and convention, in favor of freer and more individualistic life, or more freely-perceived and freely-led life.

In contemporary terms, we might think of this idea as seeking new perspective or clearing our minds of preconceptions and assumptions. And with the word infinite I will take Blake to mean that the world can be far richer or more expansive in content than we generally realize or appreciate.

As you may know, Blake’s 18th century proposal to eschew conventional thinking and routinized perception in favor of broader or more vitalizing outlooks is of course a theme from antiquity – the shunning of Apollonian order for Dionysian sensation or indulgence – and an idea that would find new footing and be re-examined in the 19th century by the German philosopher Nietzsche and other writers of his time.

There are of course many other historical and contemporary writers and teachers who have directly or indirectly likened perception to a door or gateway, one waiting to be opened and generally affording new perspective, growth, or even liberation. In particular, they include Gautama Buddha and modern mindfulness advocates writing about or cognizant of eastern meditative practices. And they include various scientists and philosophers exploring the natural limits and opportunities of perception. As you will see, my own views about the doors of perception are a blend or synthesis of mindfulness and scientific viewpoints.

The Nature of Perception

To consider perception in a new, natural, powerful, and often freeing way – potentially altering both how we experience life and how we live it – let’s begin with a simple definition of perception.

In scientific or objective terms, but also distilling or reductionistic ones, perception is the processing of sensory information by our nervous system. Things in the world have physical qualities or information – such as color, sound, or texture – which stimulate our senses when we attend to or interact with them and our environment overall. These sensory stimulations are then converted into electrical nerve impulses, which are received and interpreted by our brains. In these terms, each of our individual or subjective perceptions can be understood as the results of this processing.

While this common textbook description of perception is concrete, compact, and useful, it is also narrow and superficial too, since it misses what is perhaps the most essential and important characteristic of perception. This is the vast, multifaceted, and enriching experiential landscape that is, or that can be, human perception. The definition also fails to reflectively point out that natural perception enables not just scientific analysis, but also deep and intrinsic appreciation of ourselves and the world, appraisals of life’s opportunities and nuances, and emotion and the pursuit of meaning in life.

Without perception, we would have only a vegetative or crudely groping mode of life. Given this, perception can be understood as lying at the core of our nature and fundamental to our existence as highly-evolved animals. Indeed, without rich and maturing perceptions, and without our active and progressive use of these perceptions, we could not have a fully human life in any recognizable sense of this term, since we would be unable to activate and utilize our essential human capacities for discernment, reasoning, empathy, and choice. And as we will discuss, without the added step of achieving truly attentive perception, our lives can be greatly limited, less intelligent or aware, and less satisfying than they might be.

How we perceive or interpret complex nerve stimulations from our senses, and thus from the rich natural world around us, is a vast topic. Essential aspects of this process include the natural structure of our brains, which has been long-evolved for adaptiveness or health, and thus has been carefully shaped for particular modes of perceiving. Perception is also a function of our culture and past experiences, and the often unconscious memories, habits, and expectations, or framing, that we bring to life, each moment of our lives. And perception is influenced by our level of attention or attentiveness, since we have the ability as intelligent animals to be self-aware – and to employ or leverage self-awareness to examine, train or deepen, and thus alter or enrich our perceptions.

Importantly, let me add that perception also can be understood scientifically or objectively as one of four principal modes or categories of human or animal functioning. As summarized in my exhibit to the left, these four natural modes of functioning are: 1) Perception, 2) Thinking, 3) Feeling, and 4) Action.

This simple, but powerful model of the self – drawn from cognitive-behavioral psychology – is a topic in itself. Here, I would like to focus on three crucial points derived from the model and companion research:

> Our Functional Biases – in practice, most of us are naturally, culturally, experientially, or otherwise drawn toward one or two modes of functioning in this four-part model of the self (see Personal Styles for a useful treatment of this idea). And while we may be personally biased toward perception, without intentional guidance and cultivation of this characteristic, achieving and leveraging the trait of attentive perception is exceptional in many or most cultures and settings. In practice, and perhaps simply owing to the natural or situational demands of daily life, most of us tend to be biased toward: 1) thinking, feeling, or action, 2) some combination of these three often dominating modes of functioning, or 3) perceiving that is strongly, unconsciously, or inattentively colored and constrained by these other modes of natural functioning.

> Creating Time & Space – given these common biases or imbalances in our functioning, if we wish to explore the generally liberating doors of attentive perception, and the added insights and freedom that can come through a deeper and more subtle experience of life, this almost always involves altering our habitual modes or mix of functioning. We must find a way, in other words, to make time and space for attentive or intentional perception – as an end, practice, and principal mode of life in itself. And this change is nearly always achieved by at least periodically reducing our level or degree of thinking, feeling, and action, creating room for or re-prioritizing attentive perception and observation. As underscored by centuries of meditative or observational practices, and now by modern mindfulness research, this shift away from conventional or expedient thinking, feeling, and action toward the practiced and frequently more powerful state of heightened perception is usually accomplished through relaxing, calming, stilling, and ultimately observing our normal daily functioning – opening us to richer and more expansive perceptions, and thereby the opportunities of a more intimate experience of life and more informed or careful judgments and choices. Conversely, if we are busily or inattentively caught up in thinking, feeling, and/or action, we are unlikely to perceive as actively, deeply, richly, or adaptively as possible – or to live as attentively as possible. And we are thus also less likely to live as thoughtfully, receptively, and deliberately as possible as well, for reasons we will discuss next.

> Thought & Perception – my highlighting of the important qualities of receptiveness, deliberateness, and especially thoughtfulness is important to understanding the full practice, scope, and potential power of attentive or perceptive life. First, consider that this entire discussion about the nature and power of perception is primarily in the realm of thought and language, or via the mechanism of thinking, even as it naturally inspires feelings and requires perception and action. In the cognitive-behavioral approach, thought is seen as the primary driver of our behavior and our most important function for quality of life – distilling our feelings and perceptions and formulating and guiding our actions. Thought is also viewed as our primary mechanism or means for self-improvement and advancement – for working through and then to our needed goals – and there is considerable research to support this view. By contrast, in mindfulness practices and research, perception – and attentive perception in particular – is seen as the gateway to improved thinking and functioning more broadly, to greater happiness and life satisfaction, and even to personal liberation. Overall, we have good reason to think that both views are correct – that progressive thought can lead to improved functioning, including more attentive perception, and that attentive perception can progressively improve our thinking and other functioning quite broadly – and this is my view. For me, guiding thought and attentive perception allow us to reach and then pass through the doors of perception, and to enter the rich, even infinite world beyond them, waiting for us at each moment of life. Together, they permit us to more fully appreciate the remarkable features and events of the world, always around and influencing us but often seemingly apart from or ancillary to us, as we naturally and continually perceive, feel, think, and act our way through life.

Opening The Doors

This fairly simple but often quite useful summary of the science of perception may be new to you or not. It also may or may not align with your current views about how we naturally function amid daily life. And its description of the two most critical elements of both routine and improved or progressive functioning – probing thought and attentive perception – may or may not seem immediately obvious or actionable to you.

But in all cases, I would encourage you to consider that these ideas are anything but mundane or abstract, that you can and should explore progressive thought and perception for yourself, and that you might become significantly transformed from this effort. In the ultimate test of all models and ideas related to positive personal change – tangible improvement in our lives and choices – attentive perception and guiding thought prove enormously powerful and consequential. As I have suggested, they reliably form a progressive circle or cyclical process, and naturally inform and promote one another. Combined, they can expand and remake our sense of life and the world around us – changing and improving how we perceive, how we think, and how we feel and act.

Open or Receptive Thinking Unlocks The Doors, And A Life, Of Perception

In this deliberate but natural process, informing thought and ideas can be understood as the keys that unlock and open the doors to deep, attentive, and transforming perceptions of the world and ourselves. Increased or altered perception, in turn, can be seen as doors or gateways that lead us to remade or revitalized thoughts, feelings, and actions in our lives. As described in my graphic above, this circular or compounding process can immediately increase the quality of our perceptions and thoughts, and of our feelings and actions too – and all naturally, without drugs or negative side-effects, simply by using the deeply evolved faculty and natural gift of perception available to us all.

Opening the natural doors of attentive perception in this way is often palpably felt as a sense of awakening or re-awakening to life, and to the world’s natural or inherent richness, depth, and profoundness. As my flower photo above hints at, through new emphasis and exploration of perception, even simple objects in the field or background of everyday life immediately become vivid foreground entities in themselves – waiting to be examined, often informing us in unexpected new ways, surprising and delighting, and giving us new access to the magnificence that is both existence and ourselves.

Crucially, in the move to re-prioritize perception, and through the sustained practice of attentive perception, we naturally reduce entrapment or immersion in needless, unwise, disquieting, or maladaptive feeling, thought, and action. The choice to observe frees us from rote functioning and further and circularly increases our capacity for choice. It reliably improves the quality, accuracy, or effectiveness of our thoughts and other functioning. And it reinforces the practice of ensuring adequate time and space for perception in our lives. This cultivation or freeing of the observing self, in turn, leads steadily us to escape from more limited notions of life, and to create new life in the often very different world that waits beyond the doors of perception.

To begin the powerful, often initially strange but then relatively easy, and regularly transforming practice of opening and then passing through the doors of perception, we really need only begin. Perception is a ready and readily accessed natural human capacity. It is overlooked and underleveraged primarily because it is overlooked and underleveraged, rather than owing to any formidable barrier to its use. In practice, and as I have suggested, our principal obstacle to attentive perception generally lies in routine and less than optimal ways we use time and space, passively or thoughtlessly adhere to convention and habit, and inattentively or impulsively favor expedient feeling, thought, and/or action.

As a start, pick an object, really any object at hand, and perceive or observe it closely. If possible, handle the object and carefully sense its feel, its weight, its scent, and the sound it makes against your fingers. At the same time, seek to be aware of or observe your thoughts and feelings as you perceive and act in this way, and be open to any insights or learnings that occur to you.

Now, repeat this exploration of deliberate, careful, and multi-sense perception with other objects, and then in different settings. And continue exploring the world in this way until heightened perception becomes a regular practice in your life, and then a habit and new natural part of who you are and how you function in the world.

As you become more practiced in the art of attentive perception, in life beyond the doors of perception, and in gaining insights and lessons from your time there, work to expand your practice of careful perception to all things – observing the objects and phenomena of the world, others around you, and then yourself and your own inward and outward functioning.

What you will find in this sustained practice of conscious perception I will not attempt to describe, and thus potentially bias or inhibit. But I would encourage you to expect a world that is at once more personalized, more universal, far richer, and more complete than most of us ordinarily experience and realize. And this is especially true if we are normally caught up in unconscious feeling, thought, and action, or only peer hazily or timidly through the naturally wide, inviting, and extraordinary doors of perception.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and his transformative Natural Strategy method!

I’ve been planning a U.S. election recap for some time – to make sense of and find lessons in what has been an unusually tumultuous political campaign and larger period of cultural division in my nation.

In many ways, these are undeniably the best of times, with startling technological and social advances in the U.S. and around the world. At the same time, our era also can be understood as the worst of times for some, with many still left behind or otherwise feeling alienated by the new opportunities of our rapidly emerging, but naturally disruptive, global society.

Based on many weeks of polling data, my original idea was to warn U.S. progressives that they were lucky to have won a third presidential term, given an obvious gap in their programs and priorities, and to thank Mr. Trump for making this abundantly clear. But as we all now know, luck and the polls did not hold.

U.S. Populists: White, Pressured & Energized

And yet, my principal takeaway from the U.S. election and primary lesson for progressives, across the developed world and beyond, is unchanged. Indeed, Ms. Clinton’s unpredicted but not completely unforeseeable defeat is consistent with other recent populist or anti-establishment votes, in Europe and elsewhere.

Our rising populism, in turn, is a natural and recurring consequence of increasing economic inequality, social stratification, and cultural infringement, all of which are strong trends around the world today. And while populism may be a blunt or imprecise social force, it is an understandable, important, and addressable one too. In particular, current outbreaks of disquiet and opposition to established power and order have clear and instructive parallels with other populist periods in Western history (including the 1890s and 1930s).

Today, in substantial parts of both the U.S. and Europe, there is now a large minority of people who have been inattentively missed, comparatively disadvantaged, or directly harmed by the last four decades of information age expansion and prosperity, by rising globalization and multiculturalism, and by our generally impactful but sometimes narrowly-focused progressive reforms and policies. The presence and natural importance of this large but often systematically overlooked minority group – and the group that is primarily driving popular rebellion in the developed world – is the lesson I want to offer to U.S. progressives, their European counterparts, and others seeking progressive change in their nations and around the world.

As you likely guessed, this underserved U.S. and European minority is low to mid-skilled white working people. They are whites with relatively modest incomes and education levels, and are generally a group that was comparatively more prosperous several decades ago. And while this particular group is a distinctly American and European phenomenon, there are parallel or analogous groups in nearly every nation in our globalizing and rapidly changing world today.

Importantly, working whites in the U.S. and Europe are distinct from chronic deplorables – committed racists and misogynists, perpetual authoritarians and militarians, intractable xenophobes, and menacing sociopaths – who can be found, today and always, at many levels of income and across all ethnic groups.

Instead, working whites in the developed world are a group that is characteristically pragmatic, concerned with family and community, center-right politically, and protective or cautious rather than inherently anti-progressive or reactionary. While working-class whites are everywhere in the U.S. and Europe, many live away from urban centers, including outer suburbs or wholly exurban areas. And as a frequently more rural and parochial group, and a formerly more prosperous one, working whites have found themselves steadily disadvantaged, pressured, marginalized, overlooked, and/or actively dismissed for some time – in our new and increasingly globalized, urbanized, cosmopolitan, and politically correct world.

In the U.S., working-class whites predominate in solidly conservative states in the South and Midwest, and in northern industrial swing states. Notably, the latter were once especially prosperous, home to well-paying manufacturing jobs, and like their Southern counterparts, reliably voted Democratic. But long threatened by the offshoring of work, these U.S. industrial status are now far more populist and suspicious of the status quo.

As in the South, Northern working whites are increasingly Republican and in rebellion against current progressive and pluralistic efforts. And they just cost Ms. Clinton the election (and nearly her party’s nomination several months earlier). Together, these large and now merging areas of the country are known variably, and often pejoritively, as the rust belt, the bible belt, coal country, and the manufacturing heartland.

As suggested, working whites in all areas of the U.S. have been losing traditional jobs overseas, as well as to automation and immigration, for decades. They have watched an older, relatively happy, and comparatively advantaged way of life (albeit an imperfect one) recede in time with this trend. This economic and social decline began in earnest with the shuttering of textile and shoe factories in the 1970s, continued with reduced domestic heavy industry and durable goods manufacturing, and more recently has involved constrained jobs and wages in the service sector.

In this time, working whites have watched as globalization and advancing technology have steadily and disproportionately harmed their social and economic status, while benefiting the U.S. coasts, the educated, urbanites, the mobile, the technophilic, and the already wealthy.

This remarkable video offers a partial, though perhaps extreme, portrait of this significant and greatly underserved U.S. minority group, who represent something less than 40% of voters here. The video’s portrait is familiar and yet still quite arresting. And it is a portrait that easily could be drawn in other parts of the developed world today.

For me, better understanding the nature and plight of the newly but now clearly disadvantaged minority group that is working whites in the developed world – or displaced farmers and tradespeople in the developing world – engenders important new awareness of needed reforms and changes to our current progressive agendas and coalitions.

In particular, it leads to new appreciation of how working-class people, white and non-white alike, have been failed by recent social policies and social investment programs, by the real and chronically undermitigated impacts of globalization, ironically by the ideologically conservative or laissez-faire politicians that working people often support (in the U.S., until this election), and by progressives and our general failure to clearly include and consciously assimilate this sizeable group into the various progressive projects of our time.

That this often-overlooked demographic minority is hurting should be a surprise to no one, at least in the U.S., and especially to thoughtful, open-minded, and systematically-oriented progressives. In addition to experiencing now well-understood, disproportionate economic losses since the 1970s (see here and here), ongoing public health and sociological research has repeatedly emphasized the glaring and accelerating demise and marginalization of working white culture in the U.S. (see here and here as examples).

While the U.S.’s two coasts and larger cities have generally globalized, liberalized, and prospered in recent decades, the U.S. heartland, especially away from metropolitan areas, has suffered profound health and quality of life setbacks, ones associated with but larger and more invasive than economic pressures alone.

Unlike nearly all other U.S. groups, basic indicators of personal and social health have been declining for working whites, and for years. Looking at declining working white longevity, the causes are well-known, familiar to most of us, and reflect broader cultural (and social policy) failures. They include heightened and chronic drug abuse, alcoholism, violence including suicide, family breakdown and social isolation, and other health-indifferent, disinvesting, and unhopeful personal and cultural norms.

As indicated, some on the U.S. left have been inclined to dismiss disadvantaged whites, to treat them as uniformly or predominately deplorable (rather than systematically disadvantaged or disincentivized), and to approach this group derisively or with hostility – whether because the group has historically resisted progressive change or because working whites have not had the luck or wherewithal to sustainably leverage past racial and systematic privilege. This of course is shortsighted, simplistic, arrogant, vindictive or partisan on its face, and anything but progressive and socially-conscious in a full sense of these words.

The full truth, and the clear lesson of recent white working life in the U.S., is that all of us can become caught in negative or upending social and economic trends, or in limiting cultural norms, ones beyond our control and distinct from what we would choose in other circumstances. All of us live situationally. And all of us can fail, and can fail chronically and intergenerationally, owing to trends larger than us and our social networks. And when this occurs, all or nearly all of us will act (and vote) out of desperation, to advance narrow personal or parochial interests and norms, and from a narrowed and parochialized sense of life more generally.

A more adaptive, principled, pragmatic, self and socially aware, and ultimately sustainable approach to social advancement understands that inclusion and progress naturally go together, and that any accidental or imposed limit on one attribute inevitably and circularly limits the other. This perspective emphasizes the natural importance of ongoing, energetic, and relentless cultural bridge-building (as opposed to more expedient coalition-building), places a premium on assimilation and downplays needless partisanship, and promotes informed but naturally more powerful future-oriented focus and action (as opposed to the litigation of historical error and bias).

What we might call ‘inclusive progressivity’ understands that exclusion and inequality anywhere naturally creates risks of division and antipathy, and thus practical barriers and opposition to progressive or compounding change, everywhere. It foresees that excluded people of all kinds will naturally look for superior allies and new advantage, and that they will likely do this from a more zero-sum and myopic sense of the world than is possible, and than is desirable for us all.

In the wake of our unusually fraught and fractious U.S. election, I hope that progressives around the world will see the opportunity to learn from this and other recent populist rebellions – social upheavals that can be understood as rooted in or exacerbated by inadequately broad or inclusive progressive efforts – and that they will work to build stronger, wider, and more thoughtful reform agendas for the future.

As a beginning, I would urge progressives to reexamine their needed aims and ultimate constituencies, to explore less partisan or traditional coalition-focused politics and policy agendas, to embrace the idea that social investment programs needn’t be conceived and function on a zero-sum basis, and to consider that our progressive social efforts might naturally involve, benefit, and gain the support or acceptance of all, or nearly all, people.

This includes the rich and poor, white and non-white, powerful and powerless, and yes, even those of us who historically have been – or today still are – situationally, but curably, deplorable.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

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I’m recently back from an extended summer vacation, and an unusual one in some regards.

I wanted to talk about it with you briefly, with the goal of encouraging you both to take extended vacations and to make your vacations into true adventures. By this, I mean creating breaks in our routines that are more than holidays, and that become integral, inspiring, and informing aspects of our life.

My summer vacation this year lasted about six weeks, though as I will discuss, its ending point has been somewhat diffuse and I have been feeling “still away” for a few weeks now.

This summer, I backpacked about 900 kilometers, first through California’s Central Sierra mountains and then along the state’s lesser-known Lost Coast, a stretch of coastline simultaneously too rugged and fragile for the coastal highway and thus left unimproved and pristine. You can see photos of the two legs of my trip here and here via Facebook.

Perhaps surprisingly, my long distance trekking was not the unusual part of my vacation, since I typically take long summer wilderness walks. But more expectedly, this trip was indeed an adventure, providing rich experiences and new perspectives, which I think should be the standard for all vacations, whatever the season or locale.

Reflecting on my time away, five simple but I think often overlooked lessons recur, and I would like to share them with you – so you perhaps will have more successful, evocative, and adventurous vacations in the future, whether you choose to spend them walking through mountain ranges or not:

> Rest & Action – we often think of and plan for vacations as times of rest and relaxation. But the reality is that, after a day or two of resting, we often soon naturally crave action during our vacations, or during our time of living away from our regular lives. This action can of course be in the form of diversions or simple tourism. Or it can be much richer and bolder – involving new experiences, volunteering, learning and self-cultivation, reflection and planning, or exploring new fitness and well-being. As suggested, I often think of achieving this richness as transforming vacations into adventures, or into journeys.And I see it as a practice we can bring back to, and use to enrich and even transform, our non-vacationing lives as well.

> Depth & Duration – if our vacations are to achieve the richness and depth of an adventure or journey, they usually must involve a certain duration or amount of time away. Conversely, vacations of an adequate duration will often naturally lead to depth and adventure, especially if we seek or have planned rich actions or experiences. How long vacations must last to achieve depth will vary by person, and with our planned or actual richness of activities. But my experience is that at least two weeks is often essential – one week to fully step out of our regular lives and another to immerse ourselves in learning and adventures.

> Insights & Perspective – for me, the coin or reward of rich vacations, and of new experiences more generally, is an accumulation of meaningful or instructive insights and perspectives, especially ones we might not have, or might struggle to have, otherwise. Over time, our general memories of our vacations and adventures will mellow and blur. But what will remain vivid are our most poignant experiences, including moments of insight and new perspective. This is especially true if we write down our learnings and insights as they occur, and then act on them when we return to regular life and work. On my long summer walk, through a series of insights, I steadily outlined not only my next book, but my next three books. And I gradually came to see how they formed a natural trilogy, if not of scope then at least of effort.

> Life’s True Scale– in addition to specific insights and new perspectives we gain on adventures and rich vacations, another benefit is an expanded sense of the general scale and fullness of life, and of the many different lives and outlooks that others have, and that we might have too. When journeying, we frequently encounter people who live and value very differently than us, and in ways that we may admire or abhor. But this is of course an immersion in reality and our enormous world as it is, and not a reinforcement of the often more narrow and uniform experience that is our regular life – where we are often surrounded by similar people, activities, and expectations, or are otherwise kept from adventure and a journeying sense of life.

> Strange Returning – when we have rich, adventurous, and insightful vacations, one common consequence is that returning to our regular lives and occupations, to the extent we do, is that this process is itself insightful, adventurous, and rich. We succeed at heeding the advice of the psychologist William James, who challenged us to “make the ordinary seem strange” or unfamiliar, and thus more fertile with opportunities for new outlooks, learning, questioning, and change. In my case, I ended this summer’s vacation by relocating to a new part of California, which is the most unusual part of this year’s trip for me. And my returning indeed has been strange and full of new perspectives and learning – so much so that my summer adventure feels only now coming to an end, weeks after my return.

I hope these ideas about vacations and our need for informing adventures and journeys will be helpful to you. And though my return has been unusually long, and my new setting has seemed genuinely strange at times, I have found my way back to a desk and chair, and have begun working again.

After a bit of leftover work from the spring, finishing an extended update to my natural health website, I will be starting my second book later this fall – now the first of a trilogy, thanks to my own rich summer journey and adventure.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

This year’s U.S. Presidential elections have been unusually energetic and polarized.

One might attribute this fact to the unusual, energetic, and polarizing personality and candidacy of Republican nominee Donald Trump. But much like Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, Trump is unlikely to have garnered such strong interest unless the U.S.’s basic political coalitions were not themselves especially polarized and far from the country’s political center right now – and perhaps near or at the end of a period of realignment and consolidation.

Put another way, both Trump and Sanders are unlikely to have emerged as robustly and credibly as they did, or to have found such significant political space and momentum, if the U.S.’s two dominant political parties and their establishment figures were not so significantly misaligned with a divergent or repolarized national culture and electorate.

This new post-infotech, post-recovery, and post-globalization environment is one more preoccupied with economic security, alternatively via either cultural primacy or inclusiveness, than either party had realized in earnest (see Michael Lind’s excellent article, Future of American Politics, for a discussion of these trends).

While similar dynamics are underway in many countries today, now and of course in all times to some degree, the case of the U.S. is unique and especially illustrative in some ways.

First, its persistent two-party political system quintessentially embodies and institutionalizes the natural conservative and liberal forces at work in all countries, multiparty and single-party alike, and really in all complex social settings. Second, as the world’s leading or at least most watched country in many domains, the U.S.’s political machinations are observed, reported on, and scrutinized like no other country in the world today.

Given this, the currently quite polarized and habitually dualistic institutional politics of the U.S. can offer a distilling window into societal political dynamics more generally, and provide an opportunity to understand these dynamics more plainly and fundamentally. In particular, and as my title suggests, I would like to use current U.S. political events as an opportunity to specifically explore a simple but powerful model of two distinct orbits, axes, or alliances in politics, one that substantially describes social life around the world and even across history.

You may find that the model can help you to untangle and make better sense of political trends and gyrations around you, over time and wherever you are. The model clearly describes core dynamics at work in the current U.S. Presidential election, but appears generalizable to many modern electoral cycles. And it may even describe the essential foundations of most or all political systems and the innate forces at work within them, resulting from naturally varying personal viewpoints and areas of concern.

As you can see in my attached graphic (click to enlarge), the model begins by considering relative income or social power and political liberality or openness. Based on extensive research by both social scientists and psychologists – see here and here for two of many examples – we have good reason to believe that personal wealth or power and liberality, or openness to change and novelty, are significantly unrelated to one another.

There are wealthy liberals and poor conservatives, and the reverse, and the proportions of underlying liberal and conservative attitudes in many countries appear to roughly follow a bell curve or normal distribution at all income or power levels. That said, it is important to emphasize that the specific content of personal attitudes and political positions is often quite relativistic, distinctive, and idiosyncratic.

The particular issues and policy preferences of self-identified conservatives and liberals within distinct social groups are generally strongly anchored in each group’s social context, and can vary widely across societal groups and at particular points in time – though they do form clearer and common patterns over time, and with globalization and cosmopolitanism, taking a general form that has been described as a gradual and progressive “redefinition of the unacceptable.”

This natural fact of perpetually relativistic and historically-situated values and preferences – that is, the reality of varying political content – can obscure larger and far more stable patterns of conservative and liberal human outlook and predisposition, and can make fundamental or natural political and social dynamics more difficult to perceive and understand. In any case, the evenly spaced dots in my graphic, slightly larger in the center of the chart, are intended to represent the generally dispersed range of background views in any social group, irrespective of income or power.

Importantly, while political or social views are naturally diverse, you might never sense this by looking at the politics of many countries – and notably the U.S., with its entrenched two-party political system. And this is especially true, in all cases, during economically stressed and/or politically charged times. Despite diversity and independent-mindedness in people generally, political parties naturally evolve and work to coalesce these views into specific, appealing or mobilizing, and fairly predictable dominant coalitions, or negotiated sets of positions among people with naturally diverse interests and views (and always more so than is, or even can be, apparent in condensed party platforms and core themes and memes).

In two-party political systems, multi-party systems with strong governing and opposition coalitions, and single-party systems subject to significant internal division, this process can become especially polarized or divergent, with less apparent or institutional middle ground and diversity than likely exists in fact at a personal or social level. But in all cases, regardless of the number of parties and coalitions that emerge in a social system, it can be helpful to understand that there is a natural and basic tension in political systems between people who are broadly conservative and liberal, often resulting in two general, dominating, and recurring patterns of political affiliation.

My model summarizes this important idea by describing two basic orbits in modern political life, orbits that notably lie perpendicularly or in opposing directions along the model’s wealth and liberality dimensions. This two-orbit or folded figure-8 pattern will be immediately familiar to students of complexity science. As you can see in the graphic, the conservative orbit or axis (in red on the left side of the chart) is one that vertically spans and draws in people with relatively common views but often very different incomes – and thus often very different material interests.

In the model, conservative coalitions are understood to be broadly inclined to protect historical or current order and to resist or slow political change, if for different reasons – notably, with poorer coalition members seeking to assuage fear and insecurity, or acting without exposure to liberal society, and wealthier ones attempting to maintain or increase their immediate social dominance and psychological sense of security.

The other, liberal orbit or axis (in blue on the right side of the chart) is very different. It horizontally spans and draws in people with different degrees of liberality, but a common discomfort with divergent income and social power overall.

Such liberal coalitions are understood in the model as generally progressive and inclusive, and thus extending to the poor and wealthy, but also inclined to promote equalization of economic power and social conditions. And though the specific primary issues or views of liberal coalition members may differ more than in conservative coalitions, liberals commonly see their coalition, and progressivity or openness overall, as serving their basic interests and preferences – and notably in the face of reactive, parochial, and insular social forces.

Of course, in this model as in life, many personal views or issues and specific political concerns do not fit neatly into these two general political orbits. But regardless of the number of personal views, or political parties, all are understood in the model as ultimately having to choose a variation on these two basic orbits or general patterns of coalition – conservative and buttressing or liberal and accommodating – if they are to participate or be relevant politically over time, and especially in divergent or polarized times.

I would encourage you to consider this simple but potentially quite powerful model of natural political dynamics. The case of the U.S.’s current political divide seems a clear example supporting the model, and I expect it applies to many or even most modern political systems. If you want to explore this latter idea, you might plot the main demographic components of the major political parties or factions of other countries against the models two dimensions and see how well (or poorly) they align with the idealized conservative and liberal orbits.

Let me end our discussion by pointing out that my two-orbit model may be predictive and not merely descriptive. For example, it suggests that as societal groups become more equal, or as social power in groups is more evenly distributed, we might expect not only fewer highly disempowered and empowered people, but also comparatively more liberal political institutions and agendas as well. In these cases, though the proportions of comparatively conservative and liberal attitudes may not change within the group, the center of political content or social policy moves toward states of greater liberality and openness.

Looking across the world today, this seems a fairly compelling proposition, especially in developed conditions – or in countries where there is both relative equality and the absence of disheartening, dispiriting, or parochializing poverty. To see this important natural linkage between social equality and political (personal) openness, separately compare the developed and developing country lists in Wikipedia Income Inequality and Democracy Index.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

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]]>https://marklundegren.com/2016/06/21/the-two-political-orbits/feed/0mlundegrenMark LundegrenTwo Political OrbitsWorld’s Most Advanced Nationhttps://marklundegren.com/2016/05/02/worlds-most-advanced-nation/
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Do you live in the world’s most advanced nation? Or is it next to yours, or nearby?

Leaders from many nations are apt to declare theirs exceptional – perhaps the most prolific, the most righteous, the best positioned, or indeed the most advanced. Such declarations are often good politics, frequently are viewed internally as self-evident or sacrosanct, and naturally play well to local audiences, especially ones that have not considered these claims too carefully.

But which modern nation really is the best, or most advanced? It’s a question I take up in my book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life, and one I think is quite important and productive.

One answer of course is to hold that the question makes no sense, that it is impossible to answer, notably since nations are all complicated, distinctive, and thus incomparable. Other responses might involve the idea that the question is divisive and unhelpful, that none are foremost and therefore all are similar, or even that all are similarly flawed and unworthy of the label of most advanced. Importantly, each of these answers involves the assumption that such comparisons or rankings – whether involving nations or other complex entities – are inherently unreliable, dubious, or absurd.

By considering the specific question of the world’s most advanced nation, I will demonstrate that this thinking is generally unwise, dismissive, superficial, or naïve. Overall, and building on my recent piece Answering Hard Questions, I believe it overlooks the practical power and enormous natural learning opportunities reliably available to us by considering just these sorts of comparative (and comparatively hard) questions, even if our answers to them are always imperfect, controversial, and debatable – but thereby also improvable.

After all, we routinely compare things, even complex things, and often quite usefully, beneficially, and instructively. Our level of information and rigor in making these comparisons can of course vary widely, influencing the quality of our judgements. But this fact suggests the need and opportunity for care with our comparisons, rather than avoiding or downplaying them altogether, especially in crucial areas – and again especially since incisive comparisons can be quite helpful, even as they are always naturally incomplete or imperfect.

A more constructive, and ultimately more learning-rich, way of answering the question of the most advanced nation on earth today, or the most advanced anything at any point in time, is to begin from the idea that the answer inevitably depends on our criteria, our decision factors, or what is often called the foundational framing of our analysis. Not only does this approach at once aid, and wisely temper, comparisons of all kinds, the process of making our comparison criteria explicit and subject to review can be as instructive and beneficial as the specific conclusions we ultimately draw when employing them.

To make these important ideas, useful in many domains of life, more concrete, consider a hypothetical comparison of different fruits (or any other category of things). Once again, we might take the position that judging the relative merits of different fruits is impossible or ridiculous – that it is literally comparing apples and oranges.

But once we surface and decide on specific comparative criteria (for example, cost, calories, vitamins, and freshness) comparing fruits, or nations, becomes a relatively straightforward procedure – if always an imperfect and debatable one. And often, both the process of surfacing decision criteria and then considering the judgments they engender, can prove enormously insightful, revealing, and useful to us.

Highlighting the natural power and broad applicability of this approach, which we might call the process of conscious judging – or the making of judgments via clearly stated criteria, using objective information, and with the expectation of criticism and debate – I would like to take on the important, revealing, and even illuminating question of the world’s most advanced nation in our time.

For brevity, I’ll do this via a series of top-10 lists, each with different and explicit comparison criteria or factors. As you will see, the exercise or approach is more than intellectual. It can lead us to consider quite deeply any nation’s, and indeed any individual or collective’s, current state of functioning, relative degree of optimality or level of advancement, and needed or potentially superior sets of goals, values, and focus areas.

> Take #1: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – this metric is the monetary value of all final goods and services produced in a country, and is normally measured on a yearly basis. GDP measures the overall size or performance of a national economy. This metric is important to many investors, economists, and political leaders, but notably does not directly measure standard of living or quality of life. Based on 2015 International Monetary Fund data, the top-10 nations by GDP are (from Wikipedia List of Countries by GDP):

United States

China

Japan

Germany

United Kingdom

France

India

Italy

Brazil

Canada

> Take #2: Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (GDPPC) – this alternative economic measure is a nation’s annual GDP divided by its average population for a year. Unlike GDP, GDPPC is expressly used as an indicator of a country’s overall standard of living. It’s an easy metric to calculate, but suffers from several problems. One is that it does not as accurately reflect living standards relative to other measures, such as the closely related metric of personal income. Another is it does not consider relative economic equality, which is known to affect not just standard of living, but also quality of life and even national stability. Based on 2015 International Monetary Fund data, the top-10 nations by GDPPC are (from Wikipedia List of Countries by GDP Per Capita):

Luxembourg

Switzerland

Qatar

Norway

Macau

United States

Singapore

Denmark

Ireland

Australia

> Take #3: Income Equality – in contrast to the previous two lists, which focus on economic output, income equality measures assess how equally the fruit of this output, or personal income, is distributed in a nation. Income equality measures do not assess overall national income levels, only how equally income is spread throughout a nation, regardless of whether the nation is relatively rich or poor overall. There are several ways of measuring income equality. The list below (from most to less equal) is based on the GINI Coefficient and uses 2012-2013 World Bank data (from Wikipedia List of Countries by Income Equality):

Ukraine

Slovenia

Norway

Belarus

Czech Republic

Slovakia

Kazakhstan

Iceland

Finland

Romania

> Take #4: Happiness – turning from economic measures, the next list considers reported happiness, which can be understood as one of the principal reasons for promoting economic activity. Reported national happiness is just that, how happy people say they are on average in a country, during one of several annual happiness surveys. Based on 2012 Gallup World Poll data, the top-10 nations by happiness are (from New Economics Foundation HPI):

Denmark

Canada

Norway

Venezuela

Switzerland

Sweden

Netherlands

Israel

Finland

Australia

> Take #5: Longevity – in addition to being happy, most of us of course also want to live a long life. The next list considers life expectancy, or the average number of years a person may expect to live, which is often measured by birth year. Based on 2011 UNDP data, the top-10 nations by longevity are (from New Economics Foundation HPI):

Japan

Hong Kong

Switzerland

Italy

Australia

Iceland

Israel

France

Sweden

Spain

> Take #6: Sustainability – it’s great to live well, and long, but many of us want to do so without harming the planet, or in ways that are sustainable and allow future generations of people to live happy and long lives too. The next list considers national sustainability, or how likely the average lifestyle of a nation can be sustained in perpetuity.

As you might imagine, such calculations are enormously complex and probabilistic, but ecological sustainability can be gauged simply (though crudely) as the inverse of the average consumption levels or (extractive) economic activities of a nation. Based on 2012 WWF Ecological Footprint data, which assesses land needs to maintain average national consumption patterns, the top-10 nations by sustainability, or at least by low resource use, are (from New Economics Foundation HPI):

Afghanistan

Haiti

Bangladesh

Rwanda

Nepal

Pakistan

Malawi

Burundi

Mozambique

Zambia

> Take #7: Adaptivity – if the last list of countries left you wondering whether these nations were really first, or last, on a larger list, you’re not alone. While low consumption levels are ecologically more sustainable than higher ones, all other things being equal, other things rarely are equal. Indeed, several of the nations listed have low consumption levels because they are poor, buffeted by widespread poverty, or under significant ecological or social pressures. Thus, despite their low consumption levels, some of these nations in fact may be less rather than more sustainable, or naturally adaptive, than nations with higher consumption levels. And this may be especially clear if we take a long view and consider our potential for increased sustainability and adaptivity from (wealth and thus consumption-dependent) technological, scientific, and social advances.

To address these issues or problems with the previous criterion and list, the last list we will review seeks to explicitly and more fully consider national adaptivity, or the likelihood that a nation today will prosper and adapt over time – biologically, ecologically, socially, and technologically. Like assessments of sustainability, probabilistic calculations of adaptivity are of course difficult and cross-disciplinary, require long study periods to be validated, and really have not yet been taken up in earnest by scientists (but see Diamond Collapse for an important, if preliminary, example of an empirically based model of social adaptiveness).

As I have written about elsewhere, an indicative measure of national adaptiveness can be found via a combination of the last three measures we discussed – happiness, longevity, and sustainability (or low consumption levels). Together, these three measures offer a potential portrait or indicator of the world’s most naturally adaptive people today. Nations scoring high in all three measures are: a) relatively happy and thus perhaps socially cohesive and engaged in life, b) fairly long-lived and thus perhaps relatively rational and able to apply science (able to ensure public health, social security, etc.), and c) require fewer resources to achieve these outcomes, and thus perhaps are fairly resourceful or place fewer demands on their native ecosystems.

Based on a blending of the three previous data sets, via a formula created by the New Economics Foundation, a working (and imperfect but illustrative) estimate of the top-10 nations by adaptiveness are (from New Economics Foundation HPI):

Costa Rica

Vietnam

Colombia

Belize

El Salvador

Jamaica

Panama

Nicaragua

Guatemala

Venezuela

So, did your own or a nearby nation come up in one or more of the top-10 lists?

Whether or not, I trust you can see the natural power of considering questions of the best nation, the best course of action, or the best anything, consciously and with express and then progressive criteria. Far from being unhelpful or ambiguous, approaching questions in this way can be enormously instructive – especially by illuminating the criteria or values we use in our thinking, and thus leading us to ask why and what criteria might lead to better or improved (or more beneficial or adaptive) conclusions.

By exploring, stating, and remaining aware of our decision criteria, or by making explicit the values or framing we are using in our comparisons and judgments, we create much more learning than might otherwise be possible and generally arrive at more useful, considered, and enduring conclusions. This approach to judging is sometimes called double-loop processing – since we engage not just in thinking or action from facts to conclusions (a single loop or line of thought or behavior) but also think about the quality of our thinking or functioning (a second, recursive loop of thinking or processing).

At the same time, and returning to the national comparisons, I also hope our discussion has inspired you to think more deeply about what it means to be and promote an advanced nation, and what values, goals, and aims should be most important to your nation, to any nation, and even to any person.

Leaders and others may sing the praises of your nation, or the flaws of another, but such judgements always involve a specific set of criteria. And often, the criteria that we and others use in our judgments, of nations and many other matters, are unstated, questionable, even far from ideal, and perhaps easily improved – benefiting us, others, the nation we call home, and perhaps all nations.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Are you a creative type, or do you tend to focus your energies on consuming? All of us of course naturally do both, and each form of functioning can be understood as essential to the other.

If we want to live a creative life, we must at least consume enough to meet our basic material needs. At the same time, we cannot consume very much without enabling creativity – on our part and especially that of people generally.

In my book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life, I discuss the importance of creative human life in some depth. And though creativity and consumption are both natural, and naturally circular, we have good reason to believe that creativity-focused life – or high creation/low consumption lifestyles – are superior overall.

All Of Us Live On A ‘Consumption-Creation’ Continuum

This is because creativity-oriented life tends to be more natural, satisfying, beneficial, intelligent, and sustainable than living patterns marked by high consumption levels, even ones with significant amounts of creativity. Put another way, life that is principally creative, especially when aligned with or focused on crucial natural needs, often produces greater personal and social health, or natural adaptivity, than other patterns of modern living.

I would like to acquaint you with these crucial ideas, and the discussion that follows will: 1) define consumption and creativity, 2) discuss their respective natural merits and limitations, and 3) make the case for personal and collective functioning that is highly creative and also attentively limits excessive – distracting, inhibiting, unhelpful, irrational, and unsustainable – consumption.

Consumption Versus Creation

You already may have a good idea what the words consumption and creation mean, and the very different forms of natural functioning they describe. Both involve the use of resources, but in dissimilar and even opposing ways. Consumption, in its essence, is the using of resources – from raw materials to finished goods and services, and even intangibles such as security and time – as they are presented or available to us.

By contrast, creation entails the use of resources in new or inventive ways – or the production of new value with them in the terminology of economists – resulting in the generation of transformed, more efficient, or more effective resources, goods, or conditions compared with earlier ones. (In this definition, resource use that does not increase value is technically not creation, regardless of our aim or intention.) Since both consumption and creation involve the use of resources, we might be tempted to think of them as equivalent in important regards, but this would overlook essential differences in each mode of natural functioning.

To understand these differences, we might start by considering that creation, of its nature or by definition, engenders new value in the world. As such, it offers superior material outcomes for any given set of resources or conditions. While this added value may be small in any instance, compounded over time and across many acts of value creation, the result can be enormous and transformative. A simple example of this is a series of decisions to creatively invest rather than spend or consume money – if sustained, a marked shift in our wealth and freedom can result.

But a deeper understanding of the greater natural value of creation over consumption comes from considering creativity’s potential impact on health or natural adaptivity (our ability to thrive and survive over time in an evolving world, and thus amidst naturally varying and gradually increasing health challenges). Here, a basic and far-reaching difference between consumption and creation can be seen.

After all, while health or adaptivity requires some amount of resources, to ensure viability and the implements of adaptation, health can be seen more fundamentally as resourcefulness, or the ability to do more with less, rather than as resource-use, or the naturally primitive ability to make less from more. Across living nature, and modern life, it is principally creativity, rather than consumption, that enables the progressive and sustainable realization of ever-greater adaptive power, or health, from environmental resources.

To assess this important idea and enduring natural principle, you might take a moment to consider how much natural activity, or modern economic endeavor, is superfluous to the promotion of true species, or even individual-level, advances in quality of functioning. While simpler species may not be able to circumvent or surmount this natural inefficiency, modern people almost certainly can, with enormous implications for our individual and overall well-being, quality of life, sustainability, and progressivity – or again, our attainable levels of natural health.

In practical and contemporary terms – and employing the three-variable HPI metric (happiness*longevity/consumption) that I use in The Seven Keys as an approximate measure of modern adaptive health – creative and adequately pragmatic life today can allow us to: 1) become happier (or more naturally engaged in life), 2) remain so longer (that is, live longer and more prudently ), and 3) use fewer resources (or live more resourcefully, effectively, and sustainably) than consumption-focused lifestyles.

As an indicator of this, modern nations with the highest HPI scores are also among the most inventive ones as well, especially in areas that preserve social well-being (see New Economics Foundation HPI Scores). Indeed, many of these nations would score even higher without the presence of extractive economic and political institutions supplying resources to high-consumption areas of the world.

Consumption & Creation In Context

At a personal level, it’s not hard to see how an excessive focus on consumption, and even high rates of consumption in themselves, might curtail creativity, adaptivity, sustainability, quality of life, and thus natural health – for oneself and as this pattern of life becomes a social norm.

As discussed in The Seven Keys, some of the clear and reliable effects of excessive consumption include:

Greater required wealth levels for social currency and basic well-being

Reduced incentives for and an undervaluing of creativity and innovation

Increased stress and distraction, reducing our capacity to create

Given this broad and crucial set of potential effects, I would encourage you to consider your own life, and consumption levels and goals, and how they may invoke some or all of these natural dynamics in and around you.

As highlighted before, while creative life may be a wiser, more efficient, more satisfying, and naturally healthier way to use resources, it still involves resources and can potentially suffer from a number of natural drawbacks, especially when pursued in an extreme, maximalist, inattentive, insufficiently informed, or denaturalized way. These creativity-related issues, many of which correspond to the consumption effects above, include:

Social and value insensitivity, under-serving both our self and social group

Inadequate wealth and resources to permit progressive creativity and value

Reduced incentives for and a de-norming of revitalizing consumption

Increased stress and distraction, reducing our capacity to create

Again, I would encourage you to take some time to reflect on this list of considerations, and how your current creative activities and goals might be or become subject to some or all of them.

Consumption-Creation Continuum

With these two sets of ideas about consumption and creation in mind, I would like to introduce the following graphical model of how consumption and creativity are naturally related. The model is a simplification, since potential states of high consumption and high creativity are not included (a two-dimensional chart would allow this). But my approach it consistent with the idea that high states of consumption, in themselves, are often inimical to creativity and especially to natural resourcefulness, adaptation, and health.

Before concluding our discussion, I would encourage you to locate your current dominant or average functioning on the 1-10 continuum, remembering that a score of 10 ultimately may be less adaptive, or less creative or valuable, than positions somewhat to the left of this extreme in the continuum – ones still marked by high creativity but with adequate, enabling, enriching, socializing, or revitalizing consumption levels.

Beginning today, I would encourage you to become and remain attentive to both the degree and quality of consumption and creativity in your life and surroundings. Each form of using resources can contribute to health and quality of life, and each are subject to natural limitations and can cause reduced natural health and progressivity when taken to excess.

I would also like to leave you with the idea that our personal consumption and creation choices never occur in a vacuum and are always influenced by the consumption and creation choices of others, and the social norms and context they form in total.

Thus, while we may indeed markedly improve our personal health and quality of life through more attentive consumption and creation choices, these personal health effects normally can be greatly increased through social policies that seek to optimize such individual choices over time and across people – and thus amid natural change and the natural challenge to become progressively healthier in time.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

We and our groups inevitably face complex, difficult, ambiguous, or plain old hard questions, problems, and challenges. It’s a natural part of life.

Often, we struggle with the decisions, choices, or judgements they involve. And as frequently, we wish in retrospect that we had arrived at alternative solutions or chosen different responses than the ones we did.

In this sense, while complex issues and hard questions are natural, arriving at optimal or enduring answers to them is often less natural or intuitive – as important as this can be to the quality of our lives and collective functioning over time.

To help make hard questions, complex choices, and difficult judgments in life easier for you, I would like to acquaint you with an important and very flexible problem-solving technique from my book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life.

The technique is called Active Framing. As you will see, Active Framing is quickly learned and reliably employed in many settings, and with even some of the most complex or uncertain questions and decisions we face in our lives and endeavors.

Options Can Help To Solve Hard Problems, Or Simply Add To Their Complexity

To introduce Active Framing, I will start by describing how most of us naturally approach questions and arrive at answers, and will summarize this process with a simple and easy-to-remember model. We will then explore how this natural process of judging or deciding can be actively used – and really, turned on itself – to allow us to solve hard problems and questions reliably, beneficially, and often quite rapidly.

In the early part of our discussion, I will use a series of simple examples – involving Jack and Jill and their proverbial hill. But I will end with some common real-life examples of complex questions, and highlight how Active Framing can make manageable hills out of many seemingly mountainous questions, issues, and challenges.

Understanding Our Answers & Judgments

So, Jack and Jill are at the bottom of a hill, and decide to go up to fetch a pail of water. Most of us know how the story goes from here. But what brought them to this point, and how did they make this decision?

> Scenario #1 – one scenario might be that they were instructed to do so by an authority figure, and believed this was an optimal course of action, or did not want to be disobedient.

> Scenario #2 – another scenario might be that this action was customary, and they believed this custom was necessary, or that it was unwise to be unconventional.

> Scenario #3 – yet another scenario might be that they reasoned for themselves that a pail of water was needed, and that the well on the hill was the surest way to get this water.

As you can see, in each of these cases – and critically, in most answering and judging – there is an amount of reasoning that occurs against a set of background assumptions, understandings, or beliefs, as well as a still larger body of available information – which together inspire or propel action. Importantly, our beliefs, reasoning, and actions can be both conscious and unconscious.

These natural facts of life and our mental functioning are not difficult to appreciate, though we often do not think (about our thinking) in this way, and you may need to reflect on this idea for a moment.

Practically, the quality or integrity of our foreground reasoning and background information are of course important to making sound judgments. But I would like to focus for a minute on the mediating, simplifying, and enabling assumptions, beliefs, understandings, or mental maps that inevitably and necessarily distill information and permit us to reason intelligibly.

This natural, intermediate, and often decisive aspect of our moving from information to thinking, and then to judging and acting, is often called framing by cognitive researchers and theorists (see Wikipedia Framing and Herbert Simon for an introduction to this research and its origins). As you likely guessed, this crucial area of cognitive research, and the many beneficial insights and applications it has engendered, are the basis of the technique of Active Framing.

Across this important research, our framing – our creation of beliefs, understandings, or frames of reference – has been shown essential to life, since we or any intelligent entity cannot process or think about the totality of information available to us. Naturally, and unavoidably, we must simplify information via framing assumptions, beliefs, mental models, or general outlooks, before or as we think. Notably, similar simplifications of information occur when we perceive, feel, and act as well.

In an information age, the idea that we naturally simplify or distill information is not hard to appreciate. But what may be less clear is just how much of our framing occurs unconsciously or automatically, and owing to external influences we do not or only partly perceive – and thus apart from our potential to actively create useful or more optimal frames of reference.

Importantly, these automatic or passive modes of framing, like other aspects of our automatic functioning, often work adequately with small or routine matters. But they can significantly fail or under-serve us with complex questions, and amidst the overall complexity of modern life, which often require our full attention and great care if we are to proceed intelligently, adaptively, and successfully.

There’s one more thing I want to highlight about cognitive framing. As hinted at already, in addition to being natural and essential to life, framing has also been shown to often be the most crucial aspect of or influence on the quality of our thinking, decision-making, and actions in many settings.

In life, how we frame can strongly guide, or anchor, how we subsequently or concurrently think and act. Because of this, when we seek to decode or explain our or other’s reasoning and actions, it is often the case that our framing is the principle driver of the ways we think, feel, perceive, and act – rather than the quality of our thinking. And when we look at how well or easily we solve hard questions and complex challenges, here too the nature or quality of our framing often proves most decisive.

Model Of Answering Or Judging

Returning to the scenarios above, it is clear that Jack and Jill could have been misinformed or reasoned erroneously when deciding to ascend the hill. But even in these simple scenarios, you can perhaps see that variations in their core beliefs, assumptions, or framing are apt to be the largest determinant of their, and our, eventual judgments and actions.

Overall, absent metal illness, people tend to be fairly reasonable in their reasoning. And when we appear unreasonable – or seem to think or act unusually, strangely, or maladaptively – it is often our distilling assumptions, cognitive frames, or information-in-use that is the principal cause.

Importantly, the criticality of our framing or the ways we approach issues is an idea that you can quickly explore and test for yourself. It is a principle you can use to reliably gain new situational insights and even win arguments – in both cases, by focusing on and probing assumptions rather than reasoning. And the idea is of course at the heart of that frequent admonition, never to carelessly assume.

Overall, the natural process of deciding, answering, or judging can be described or modeled by the four-step process shown below.

information > framing > reasoning > judging

Though this model is simple, it proves remarkably powerful at describing, and ultimately improving, the way we and our groups answer questions, make decisions, and respond to challenges, large and small. And it holds the key to astutely examining complex questions of many kinds, and making them more manageable and easier to answer.

The power of the model lies first in its ability to help us understand the overall process of judging, or more plainly frame or think about our thinking. But at least as importantly, the model also permits us to isolate these natural components of all judgements and gauge their relative importance in our functioning. And when we and researchers do this, our framing often proves to be both decisive and frequently unconscious or unexamined, especially when we are engaged in complex thinking and problem-solving.

To explore these ideas, consider a memorable decision you made recently. As you recall the decision, you will likely have a fairly easy time recounting or reconstructing your reasoning and the key information or points of fact you employed. What may be more difficult to surface, subtle, and ultimately important to your judgment, however, are the underlying assumptions, understandings, or framing that drove or anchored your reasoning.

You might also consider that when you struggle with a complex choice or decision – and especially when you don’t know how to think through or reason out an answer – the problem we typically face is not with our faculty of reason. Rather, we are more likely stymied because our reasoning does not have an enabling frame or facilitating set of assumptions within or upon which to operate. This idea explains why many problems – from mathematics to assembling furniture – can be initially difficult or arresting, but then are often easily resolved, once frameworks (or instructions) for processing are discovered or laid out.

Again and again, we can observe in our problem-solving that when a definitive frame is present or found, even if this frame is crude or less than ideal, our reasoning and judging normally proceed fairly quickly and directly. Notably, we can further discern that our reasoning and judging typically operate with adequate precision across many of the problems and challenges we and our groups face, and thus with the many frames we employ amidst life, and that the quality of our reasoning and judging generally reflects the quality of our framing.

Because of this – owing to the fact that framing is unavoidable or essential to thinking, and because framing tends to strongly influence and even direct our thinking – careful and attentive framing proves crucial to quality of life and group functioning generally, and to complex decisions, judgments, and actions in particular.

From Passive To Active Framing

As its name suggests, Active Framing places special emphasis on understanding the cognitive frames, assumptions, or criteria that we use, or might use, when answering a complex question or making an important decision.

Through Active Framing, and as you will see, difficult problems of many varieties can be routinely resolved more wisely, optimally, and quickly than is typical – and notably than when we or others focus primarily on reasoning and judging, or on protracted information gathering.

How We Frame Generally Determines What We See – And What We Think

In principle and practice, Active Framing first involves stepping back from questions, issues, problems, and challenges – and our initial or current reactions to or processing of them. The technique then focuses us on building a decision framework and finally examining critical information required to respond to the issue intelligently.

As mentioned before, Active Framing leads us to think about our thinking. Perhaps helpfully, this process of reflection on our thoughts is sometimes referred to and viewed as superior double loop processing. This idea, or frame, proposes that we can function simultaneously and more advantageously with a primary loop of task-focused thinking or acting, and a second, reflective loop examining the first loop (see Wikipedia Double Loop Learning)

To initiate Active Framing, a good way to begin is by stopping to consider how we could or might answer a question or resolve an issue, without moving to a solution. In this way, we can better open ourselves to new perspectives, understandings, or framings of the issue. As outlined before, the technique takes as likely that we will reason and judge adequately, once a helpful or enabling, and ideally adaptive or transforming, frame is discovered – or rather, created.

Active Framing can be described with the following four steps:

> Step #1: Step back – the first step in active framing is to create new perspective on the question, issue, or challenge before us or our group. In practice, we generally will struggle to consider and create new frames when we are immersed in an existing one. So, take a break, do something else, or otherwise create some mental distance from the matter before you. To return to Jack and Jill, this might involve stopping before the hill, putting down their pail, and making time to consider their actions.

> Step #2: Clarify essential goals – without moving to answer the question or resolve the issue, describe how success would likely look in broad terms. This can include identifying what matters or issues must be resolved, what people or stakeholders must be satisfied, and perhaps what deadlines must be observed. For Jack and Jill, this step might involve determining that a successful decision requires them to clarify: a) how much water is needed, b) from which sources it is best obtained, and c) how the water is best transported. As you can see, the matter is not decided or answered at this point. Instead, we more simply clarify what needs to be addressed or solved for in an eventual solution.

> Step #3: Frame your solution – once your needed goals or decision points have been clarified, list the key considerations or factors that should be evaluated to help you reliably and satisfyingly reach your goals. Such considerations form your decision frame or framework, at once clarifying, simplifying, and exploring essential issues before you, and helping you to make more informed and attentive decisions. Often, such considerations will include evaluating specific needs, costs, time, effort, and risks. For Jack and Jill, their key factors or decision framework might include assessing actual water needs, nearby water sources, potential transportation methods, and of course potential risks traveling to and from each water source. Their frame might also include assessing the added benefits – whether economic or from having more uninterrupted free time – of transporting additional water. In this way, a frame for sound reasoning and judgment is actively, reliably, and often easily created.

> Step #4: Gather info & decide – ideally with at least three and not more than seven decision framework factors or criteria, the final step is to gather information, evaluate options against these factors, and render an answer, judgment, decision, or solution to the question or issue that you or your group face. Generating options from information is a separate topic, but always strive to give yourself or your group at least three distinct options for a solution to a problem or challenge, and more if it is a hard or complex one. If you have fewer options than this, this generally means you need to either gather more information or generate additional factors for your frame.

As a learning aid, I would encourage you to immediately choose a real-life issue or pending decision, and then use this process to explore and actively frame your needed set of key considerations to resolve the matter. You may be surprised at how quickly and easily complex or ambiguous questions can be re-framed, and then more easily and reliably addressed in this way.

Difficult Questions Answered

In practice, and as predicted by considerable research, the technique of Active Framing can be quite powerful and even transformative.

It can lead us to: 1) see issues in a new light, 2) explore and surface what is most essential within or around an issue or problem, 3) efficiently gather critical high-quality information, and 4) reason and judge far more effectively. And this is especially true compared with more intuitive or passive approaches to the framing and answering of complex questions.

Since the simple case of Jack and Jill borders on the trivial, here are a set of practical questions that are both common and normally difficult to answer intuitively, but are often quickly resolved or made manageable through Active Framing:

How should I act in certain settings, or in new ones?

Should I begin, end, or alter a particular relationship?

Is it desirable, or ethical, to behave in a specific way?

Should our group enter a new operating space or venture?

Who are the best people for a new team within our group?

What college, program, and career should I pursue?

How should I best spend my time over the next year?

We of course are each frequently bedeviled by these and similar questions. As I said before, they are a natural part of life and life’s inherent complexity. Often, we respond to questions of these kinds intuitively and uncertainly, perhaps engaging in either inadequate or excessive thought and reflection, and end up with solutions or answers that are tenuous, unsatisfying, and even haphazard.

A waiting alternative is to give ourselves new, adequate, and attentive structure to guide our thinking – by actively and curiously framing the way we are thinking, or will think, through an issue or challenge. In each of the above questions, perhaps you can see already that there are essential considerations or factors that we can quickly surface, not only to make answers to these questions easier and more reliable, but that tellingly also makes vast amounts of information, complex reasoning, or exacting judgments unnecessary.

For example, with the first question, we might actively frame the question of our most desirable behaviors in terms of aligning our actions with the specific outcomes or goals we most want to achieve, as a person or group, and in specific settings and more broadly. This framing requires us to clarify our goals, but otherwise leads to fairly easy answers to what for many is one of life’s most vexing questions. Alternatively, we might frame our needed behaviors in terms of authenticity, which again would compel us to define or frame this personal or collective quality in specific terms.

In just this way – by consciously creating a problem-solving frame – all of the complex questions above and many more can be readily made manageable. Go ahead and try a couple of the above questions on your own, using the four-step process I have introduced.

As I have emphasized, two of the most crucial lessons of psychology and cognitive science over the last 100 years are that our framing strongly drives our reasoning and eventual judgments, and that our frames can be actively evaluated or informed, made more conscious, and thereby improved or trued, aiding our reasoning and judging.

By moving from passive to active framing, or from single loop to double loop processing – where we consciously think about the nature and quality of our thinking, framing, and overall consciousness – we often find a new ability to live more powerfully and freely, and that once formidable problems shrink in size and complexity, and perhaps in importance too.

If you will practice and encourage Active Framing, especially when confronting hard, complex, and ambiguous problems and questions, you are likely to become a far more skilled decision-maker and problem-solver – and even someone sought-after for these powerful and only partly natural qualities.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

I have a new book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life, that I would like to personally invite you to learn more about. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and print editions, including a free preview. The book summarizes my seven Natural Strategy workshops, which guide the progressive mastery of modern life through conscious and informed natural functioning.

Overall, The Seven Keys spans three crucial areas, each enabling richer and more adaptive modern life today: 1) essential material from my seven personal and collective workshops presented in a self-paced format, 2) a step-by-step guide to creating transformative Natural Strategy plans for both individuals and groups, and 3) exploration of the science and principles behind my workshops and larger Natural Strategy method.

Included in The Seven Keys are over 250 graphical exhibits, tools, and models, helping you to understand and then master the Natural Strategy method and the book’s seven action areas, or keys, for Natural Life.

Importantly, this last term describes our new modern potential to consciously harness and accelerate natural evolutionary processes for our personal and collective benefit. Accelerated natural adaptation and evolution, or health-increasing natural progressivity, is the overarching focus of The Seven Keys, my Natural Strategy method, and my work in total. In its essence, Natural Life is the work of nature made self-aware and powerfully brought to the various tasks and demands of modern life.

If you are interested in our now waiting potential for conscious, vibrant, and intentionally accelerated natural evolution – and thus for renaturalized modern life and greater fulfillment of our natural potential as modern people – The Seven Keys will likely be quite compelling. At its core, The Seven Keys offers a transformative new way of looking at evolving life, understanding its essential lessons for modern people and groups, and guiding our lives and collectives toward ever-increasing natural vitality, adaptiveness, and success.

Thanks to the power of internet-based publishing, The Seven Keys is available in a number of low-cost editions, including availability at local libraries. As the book’s jacket overview states, The Seven Keys is indeed “brimming with ideas for new natural, personal, and collective awareness and vitality in our time,” and I hope you will seek it out.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

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